


Bright Corners

by DesdemonaKaylose



Series: Strange and Ugly [2]
Category: Strange Magic (2015)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Bar/Pub, F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-10-09
Updated: 2015-12-01
Packaged: 2018-04-19 23:08:48
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 4,837
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4764452
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/DesdemonaKaylose/pseuds/DesdemonaKaylose
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>where money applies, this is not a love song</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Prologue

This is how it happens:

Bog is sitting on his bike in the parking lot of a café that’s been closed for a month. August is alight with heat lightning, blowing its dark willow patterns along the edges of clouds, one moment faintly glowing with light pollution and the next black against an orange sky. It’s the quietness that unnerves him. The woman who could be his girlfriend closes the doors of the café and throws her scarf around her thick neck like a movie star.

“They didn’t leave anything behind,” she says, “you were right and I was wrong, okay. Laugh it up.”

A smile breaks the delicate shell of his trepidations. “Don’t worry,” he says, “I would never laugh at you.”

Her expression flickers between uncertainty and pleasure, her lips—green tonight, he thinks—twitching up and down. She’s no more of a crook than he is, which is to say she’s a little bit crooked and a better bit good at covering her tracks. He knows a good fence, though, which is something at least he can bring to the table. In their day jobs they’re not much alike, but in this he hopes he’s found kindred of a kind.

“Let’s go out tomorrow,” he says, in a rush, “just us. Let’s do something.”

The writhing uncertainty of her expression doesn’t change. “Well,” she says, “I don’t have any plans…”

His hands nearly let go of the handlebars, one of them slips all the way off, and he tips forward before he can totally catch himself. He manages to get the free falling hand onto the wheel and bangs his chin in the process. It’s not very smooth. He spends the next couple minutes being chided and examined for injuries, and hopes with little real hope that her soft wide hands will never leave his skin.

 ♔

This is how it happens:

He’s texting her from a park bench as the light over a sprawling holding pond goes purple with twilight, his ankle kicked up over his knee, searching through his years-old phone for the heart emoji. Two of his acquaintances are squabbling over a bag that’s probably worth more than he makes at his day job in a week. From the sound of it, somebody just got an elbow in their eye.

“Maybe three hearts is too much,” he says, tapping his long nails onto the touch screen with a hollow little noise.

One of the squabblers pauses with their arm stretched up over their head, bag suspended precariously from a couple fingers. “Didja finally ask her out?”

“No,” he answers, narrowing his glance aside at them.

The other one snorts. “Then don’t send her _any_.”

He ignores them as they crash off the edge of the picnic table and onto the sandy ground, preoccupied with the text he’s just received.

_Oh come on, I’ve got to make time for my other friends too they keep saying they never see me anymore_

He runs his nails over the leg of his jeans, digging in a little too deeply. He knows he should just _do_ it, he’s not doing either of them any favors by keeping this secret, but it could all go so wrong so easily. He’s run the scenario a hundred times in his head. He’s mapped out conversations, planned arguments—there’s no way to guarantee a favorable outcome. What he needs is a case, a solid defensible case. He needs to be so good that even a smart, attractive girl would hesitate to shoot him down. This is too important to just be himself. He’s seen himself. It’s no good. He has to _prove_ that he can be _better_.

The surface of the lake is a dark mirror of the sky, powered with the pale figures of clouds. He kicks a rock down the shoreline and breaks the reflection for a few precious seconds. She’s crooked, like him, and she’s a schemer. She’s clever and she’s bold, and it occurs to him that if he wants to make a case he’s going to have to stop riding her coattails and make a statement of his own. Bring something to the table. There’s been enough mooning and slinking in this relationship already, he thinks. He needs to be an equal.

 ♔

It happens like this:

On the night he buys the old café, he picks her up from her place and drives her to that empty storefront. He shows her where the bar is going to go, where the sign is going to hang, outlines the whole business proposition. He’s already devised a system for arranging the books, he tells her, to cover her dealing operation. She can go big. She can _be_ big. Her business is the corner stone of his whole business proposition. She looks wary, and then intrigued, as she follows the lines he’s drawing in the air.

For you, he tells her, finally coming up short of words.

“Bog,” she says, “this is so much.”

“Do you like it?” he asks, breathing a little heavily for how fast he’s been talking. He’s never made a pitch like that before.

“You’ve really thought this through,” she says. “It might actually work.”

She deals, he steals—he doesn’t know anything about her business first hand, but part of what he’s trying to prove is that he has been listening. On an impulse, he grabs her hands and pulls her close.

“We could be partners,” he says, “do you think?”

She looks down at their joined hands and says, “You don’t mean business partners, do you?”

“Ah. That too, but—”

Her expression is shifting, a slow motion dissolve into something akin to horror. Her lips part. Her fingers go limp in his grasp.

“Oh no,” she says, “no no. No, this is a problem.”

Bog drops her hands like they’re dripping liquid nitrogen, scalding cold. He spins, the joints of this digits aching with this shock as if he really had been burned, trying to breathe. She hates him. Oh, they were doing so well and now he’s ruined it, he peeled up the serviceable outer layer of himself and exposed the revolting underside and how could he have expected anything else? A case? A _case_? What was he thinking?

“Um,” she says, somewhere behind him, and her voice is coming to him through an endless distance, “Bog?”

You can’t make a pig’s ear into a silk purse, can you? He can’t believe he allowed himself to forget. Well of course she doesn’t want him. Who in their right mind would want him? He can’t blame her for knowing better, it was _his_ stupid hope, _his_ stupid fawning after her like a concussed dog. He _knew_ better. Bog is surrounded by beautiful people. Sometimes he feels as if some deity’s toddler dragged him up from the recesses of some awful muck and set him loose on an unsuspecting surface world. It isn’t even that his nose it too long, or his brow too heavy, or his cheekbones too hollow. It’s marrow deep, it’s worse than that. Physical unattractiveness can be tolerated, acclimated to. There is something in the very matter of his being, in the force that animates his body, that demands to be loathed. He is a swamp of a person, ugly and unlovable.

“Bog,” she says, sounding distressed, maybe? “Let me explain—”

He nearly gags, he will not stand here while she tries to feed him sugar coated pity. If she says one more word, one more, he’s going to be sick.

“I have to go,” he says, scraping the words up from his rapidly closing throat.

“You don’t look so good,” she says, “please, hold on a sec.”

Her distress, standing in the darkness with her hand half-outstretched, will terrorize his nights for a long time after. The memory of her green scarf, her wrinkled brows, finds him whenever he’s trying to sleep, and he rolls over and buries his face in a pillow half wishing he could just stop breathing, as he remembers that he never even thought to call her a cab.

He wants to feel vindicated about it, but in truth he just feels like it proved her right.

 ♔

It happens like this:

Bog puts together his bar nearly by himself, sweating on his knees in the sawdust and the late summer sunlight that drips through the glass storefront. He thinks about gritty outer shells and revolting wet insides, he thinks about the impossibility of desire, he thinks about how stupid he must look.

His mother visits him, he has no idea how she knew what he was working on, but she always does and so he’s not terribly surprised. She says he’s stewing. He says she can hand him that level or she can get out of the way.

A few acquaintances drop by later on, possibly at his mother’s prompting. He doesn’t put anything past her. He offers them jobs, grimly ignoring their uncomfortably offered sympathy.

He’s going to open this business with or without a partner, come hell or high water. He’ll be self-sufficient, independent, he’ll chase no more soft fading shadows. In the dull blueness of a dawn he’s worked right through, he pauses with a hand full of nails and gathers a shaky breath. No more, he decides. If love won’t take him then he’ll stop begging after it, by god. Who needs it, really? Who needs it?

Here is how it happens:

In a park beside the murky edge of a ditch some politician tried to name a lake, Bog hears sobbing from the echo chambers of the ladies’ public restroom and turns up the collar of his coat, although the autumn breeze is quiet today. The voice breaks familiar and unfamiliar, like a voice he had heard in a dream. Maybe he knows her. He decides he doesn’t care.

 _And who cares for you_ , the quieted wind snaps at him.

No one, he knows now, no one who has the choice. No one will ever love him who isn’t absolutely required to. He can return the courtesy well enough.

 ♔

 


	2. Chapter 2

It is dark in the Plutonium, where the rim of the bar is lit by lavender neon and the high tables that crowd the corners of the room glitter green from the window signs. They are arranged artlessly, their dark wood backs like strange insects clustered in a hive. The regular customers, many of them, carry jackknives in their boots. The police have never been called on this bar. Losers of drunken brawls can be seen sullenly forking cash into the hand of the owner, _for damages,_ he says. The next day the broken window will be fixed. No insurance company has ever been contacted about this bar.

The front of it is the single living chamber in what used to be a midsized mall, years ago, and it’s set back from the busy flash of the main drag by a wide and disarrayed parking lot. Very few people wander in. Dawn, of course, is like few people herself.

The girl comes stumbling in on a summer evening, in shoes with an artful bite taken out of the three inch heels. In the neon purple of the lights around the entrance she glitters like some expensive curio piece from an illicit collection. He’s learned her name before, but it won’t click for him until much later. For now, she’s only a pint sized socialite blinking huge blue eyes at his bar.

She wobbles, reaching out and steadying herself on the back of a hulking man who doesn’t seem to know what to do with this development, and then totters into the room. Bog looks up at the clatter of her shoes and spies another shape lingering just outside the door, and so he dismisses the girl nearly as soon as she registers. Whoever her friend outside is, they’ll no doubt be the brains of the operation. They’ll drag her back out as soon as they work up the nerve to push open the door. When a flash of blond settles into the only open seat at the bar, he does a double take.

She grins up at him, her cheek squished under her fist in a way that feels faintly familiar. Out through the glass of the storefront the accompanying figure has disappeared. He looks back down at the girl, who is now tracing complex whirly spirals on his bar top with one pink fingernail. He slaps a rag down and knocks her hand out of the way in a pretense of cleaning.

“I’m in _love_ ,” she confides, leaning in. The down side to his aggressively scrubbing her imaginary curlicues off the counter is that he’s leaning in closer than he’d like. He curls his lip.

“Not allowed on the premises,” he growls.

She blinks her huge gemstone eyes. “Not allowed?” she repeats. “I’m not allowed?”

“No swooning, no cute talk, no,” he says, “ _PDA_.”

She closes one eye, squints at him. “I don’t think that’s a _real_ rule,” she slurs at him. “You just made that up.”

“It’s a rule _now_ ,” he replies.

“You can’t just—you can’t make up rules.”

“Ah’m the owner,” he says, “I can make up whatever I like. Get lost, girly, or you’re liable to get yourself _hurt_.”

She pouts. Bog doesn’t think he’s ever met a person above the age of six who actually _pouted_ , and it’s a little fascinating in a discomfiting sort of way.

“Are you even old enough to be in here?” he asks, pausing his aggressive incursion on the nonexistent dirt of the bar.

“You wanna see my ID, mister rude?” she answers, fumbling in her purse.

“Don’t,” he says, “just. Don’t. If I don’t see your fake ID nobody can ask me about it.”

“Oooh,” she says, “for a meany grump grump you’re pretty _straight-laced_.”

He’s got two choices here. He can eject her bodily from the bar and deal with the inevitable shrieking and crying—he knows the type—or he can ignore her until she gets bored. That seems like the lesser of two evils. He stomps off down the bar to refill a beer, and his resolve to keep firmly out of that girl’s bubble of attention last only as long as the first chorus of S _ugar Pie Honey Bunch_. He stomps back.

“No. _Singing_.”

By this point the patrons on either side of her have started to shift their stools away, their eyes silently pleading with Bog to make her stop. It’s not that she can’t sing, it’s just that drunken slurring and sharp pitch are a bad mix at the best of times. He glares back at them all, daring them to do something about the problem themselves. They avert their eyes in unison.

“You know—” she says, “you know, what your problem is?”

“Yes. It’s blond and it can’t carry a tune in a bucket,” he snaps.

“You’re too _serious_ ,” she says, ignoring him. “Bars’re supposed to be a _party_. Everybody here’s got… they’re sad. It’s really, it’s…”

“ _Sad_?” Bog offers, sneering.

She lights up. “Yes!”

Bog scrubs his fingers over his eyelids. Tonight is going to be a long night if it keeps on like this. “Where’s your boyfriend?” he asks, “wasn’t he with you outside? Why don’t you go back out to him.”

She sniffles a little bit. “Sunny said, Sunny’s not my boyfriend though, Sunny said if I wanna do dangerous stuff I can do it on my own. He’s never said anything like that before. Do you think he’s mad at me?”

Bog ignores her.

“But you’re not dangerous, are you?” she says, patting his hand. It feels like being shocked, he distantly considers that no one has really touched him in over a year, the casualness of it disturbs him.

His lip curls back, and he leans in much closer. “Princess,” he hisses, “I am a very bad guy.”

She smiles in drunken sympathy. “Aww,” she coos, “don’t be so hard on yourself!”

Bog reels back, a little dazed, and decides he cannot handle the full wattage of her encouraging little smile. He buries himself in the whisky rack and refuses to turn around. Look, there are—there are plenty of bottles in here that need to be consolidated. Rearranged for better access. Organized. He hasn’t organized the shelves since he opened the place. Now is a _perfect_. time.

He’s very deeply invested in continuing to ignore the middle seat of the bar, come hell or high water, so when the first notes of distress reach him he does his best to bury his head deeper in the stock. There’s a new voice involved now, though, which means a new customer, which means all responsible business owners are required to at least take down an order. He turns, with a sigh, and sees the girl recoiling from some stranger who has muscled in much closer than seems to be welcome. She’s about to tip over backwards. This guy is still leaning closer.

“Hey,” Bog snaps, “are ya here to buy something or harass ladies?”

The man grins at him—he’s clean shaven and handsome in a way that none of the Plutonium’s patrons ever are, something that reeks of silver spoon in the shape and the contours of his mouth. He looks like exactly the type this glittering waif of a girl would hang around with, but nothing about her posture seems to agree.

“Sure,” the man says, “two shots of something sweet for me and the lady. We can pre-game.”

“I told you I don’t want any,” she mumbles. “I don’t have enough cash even if I did.”

“We’ll work something out,” he replies, waving her off.

“Look,” she says, “number nine’s not—isn’t really my thing.”

It is at this point that Bog stops trying to think of a good way to quietly get this girl away from this asshole without disrupting his entire bar, and promptly disrupts his entire bar.

Bog reaches across the width of the bar and snatches this guy up by the collar of his shirt, dragging him halfway back over. “I’m sorry,” he says, low and terrible, “ _what_ were you trying to sell the girl?”

The man’s mouth smacks open silently a few times, his hands scrabbling at the air just above Bog’s, as if afraid to actually touch. “Are you a cop?” he manages, after a couple dry starts.

“Do I _look_ ,” Bog says, “like a cop?”

“It’s,” the man says, “it’s just—it’s—”

“Here’s a little house rule for you, _tourist_ ,” Bog says, dragging him a little bit closer. “If you so much as mention that drug in my bar again, and I will break all of your fingers. Joint. By. _Joint_.”  

“Uhhmm,” the man breathes.

Bog grins and tosses the man over backwards into a twisted heap on the floor. “I suggest you leave,” he says.

When the miserable little toad has scraped himself up off the woodwork and disappeared, Bog turns his attention back down to the girl. She tries to smile, but the expression comes out too nervous around the edges. She twitches like she’s trying to look back at the door.

Bog sighs a little, tired and painfully aware that it’s only ten in the evening. “I’m not angry with you, princess,” he says.

“Dawn,” she says. “My name’s Dawn.”

He thinks that she must not go places alone very often, if that little incident shook her up so much. She seems a little sobered, but maybe it’s only that her insufferably good mood has been punctured. It’s kind of hard to watch. “If you’re going to stay,” Bog says, “please, no more singing?”

She gives him her best watery smile. “I better go find Sunny. He’s—he was probably. You know. Better catch him.” She rubs at the glitter over her cheek, knocking off a little shower of it. There’s still plenty more where that came from. “I shouldn’t’ve ditched him. We always do what I wanna do. He was right.”

“Travel safe princess,” Bog says. He feels strange and hollow, like he always does after talking to pretty people. He’s frightened her. Not when he had been trying to, of course, sure. But he’d succeeded eventually hadn’t he. And that was what she would remember.

He’s set his lips in a stiff grimace and chalked it down as a win, and nearly managed to let it go,  when the second ill-placed stranger bursts through his door. A young man, lip wibbling nervously, pokes his head around the door.

“D-did Dawn—”

“Sorry,” Bog says, “your princess is in another castle.”

“Bu, but—”

Bog narrows his eyes, leaning over the bar. His nails dig into the wooden countertop. “Leave,” he says, “ _now_.”

The doorframe rattles under the force of the boy’s hasty retreat.

Bog sighs, lifts an empty glass from a sodden regular’s hands, and retreats to the shelves. He loathes these happy bright people with their happy bright lives, loathes the way his bar feels when they go. Regulars, now, regulars he knows how to handle.

 

 ♔

  _Marianne_ walks into his bar like Hannibal crossing the alps, the thunder of elephants shaking stones in his wake. The glass door cracks into the wall—there are no door bells in the Plutonium, but if there had been, Bog is certain they would have been slung airborne across the room. She’s wearing boots. No heel. She doesn’t look quite like a regular patron, in her good black dress, but somehow Bog’s first thought is still to look around for an empty chair that would usually be filled.

At this point, Bog does not recognize her.

“Where is Dawn,” she snarls.

Patrons are shifting in their seats, peering over glasses to get a better look at her. The heavy rumble of conversation dies down low enough that Bog can catch one or two isolated lyrics coming from the radio beside the bar. “Trouble,” a growling voice sings, and, “soon.”

“Get lost,” Bog says. He pulls up another glass to clean from the rack. “I’m not a goddamn directions service.”

Marianna stalks the floor and slams her flat palms down across the bar top. Her nails are beautifully sculpted into sharp purple peaks. “I know you know where she is,” Marianne says, “so let’s skip the part where you tell me some outrageous lie and I have to beat it out of you.”

“Out of _me_ , tough girl?” Bog replies, looking her up and down. She has strong arms, calves, he wouldn’t be surprised if she takes kickboxing classes on the weekends. But her nails. She can bluff all she likes. Bog knows an amateur when he sees one.

She jabs out and grabs the collar of his shirt. She doesn’t pull him down, either because she doesn’t have the strength or because she doesn’t think it’s necessary. Her hand is light against his collarbone, the most delicate threat. He tries not to be impressed.

“Do you see some other roach scuttling around with my answers?”

Bog bares his teeth. With one hand he carefully peels her grip from his shirt, drops it in mid air like so much trash. If she won’t give him the courtesy then he won’t either.

“Whoever you’re looking for,” he says, “you had better get going. Bad things happen to nice girls in neighborhoods like this.”

Marianne stands perfectly still for a moment, her nostrils flaring, and then she draws back one small fist.

Here is a thing that Bog King knows about fighting: girls are at a disadvantage largely by their own doing. Precarious footwear, overly constricting clothes, and yes, long elegant nails. Bog reels back from the punch, feet sliding across the smooth floor, and scrapes blood from his lips with the back of his hand. Marianne pulls back, slowly, and unclenches her delicate, reddened fist. The insides of her palms are bleeding in four deep, precise wells. Black beads of liquid pooling and trickling in the neon light. Without bothering to assess the damage, she swings one foot back, brings up her hands, and reverses her stance.

“I bet you’ve had your nose broken before,” she says, eyeing his brutal features coldly. “Would you like to do it again?”

“Better than you have tried,” he replies. He feels his eyes narrowing.

One of his employees chooses that moment to poke his head out from the back room. “Do you need some help?” he asks, fingers tapping nervously on the doorjamb.

Bog doesn’t look away from the woman. She hasn’t blinked. They’re both watching the door to the backroom without shifting their gaze an inch.

“Get out,” Bog says.

Both his employees start making distressed noises. He smacks the counter behind him, flat palm, the sound like a gunshot.

“Get _out_ ,” he says again, and this time they close the door behind them. Around the room, certain people are dropping crumpled bills onto the tables, adjusting their coats. In a few stark seconds half the population of the establishment has disappeared out the door and into the parking lot. Bog draws himself up and comes around the side of the bar, into the empty space at the center of the floor where Marianne is waiting.

“Alright then,” he says. “Give it your best shot.”

She swings. She comes forward like a knife between plates of armor, slipping between his arms to bury an uppercut into his stomach. He twists and catches the blow on his forearm. They reset. She kicks up at him, her flat soled boot coming within a millimeter of something he’d really rather not get a boot in, but he manages to catch the kick with both hands because she’s fast but she’s not subtle. She breaks his grip and rocks back. They reset. Her hair is falling across her forehead in sharp angles as she bursts forward. They reset. She ducks a blow that turns his own momentum against him. They reset. Their hands meet in mid-air at the crux of two equally ill-timed gambits. They reset.

They are moving in circles, kicking chairs out of their paths, opening up the barroom floor like a dancer’s stage. Bog will realize later that the room is full of quick breaths and clinking cups as the remaining regulars watch them collide like spinning tops.

She turns, her back to him, crushes his instep with her solid boot, catches his arm with hers—in the brief moment of her pause he can see the two of them as if from a distance, the tableau strikingly like an image of a tango, their arms extended together in common purpose. He breaks her grip. They reset.

“Do you take kickboxing lessons?” he asks, wiping still more blood from his split lip. The back of his hand is shiny and dark with streaks of blood. He imagines that it’s stained his gums now as well.

She dives, throwing the back of her fist at his throat in a blow that would have crippled him if he hadn’t dodged it so well.

“Mixed, actually,” she says, and ducks under a right hook. “There’s a place on Pearl street with really good rates.”

“Are you thinking about going competitive?”

“Yeah, but there’s not much going on in the area right now.”

In the middle of a defensive spin, Bog throws a fist at the place where her head ought to be and meets empty air—his balance tips the wrong way, his center of gravity is off, his heel slides across the floor searching for purchase and finds spilled beer instead, and he goes backward into the slight body of Marianne.

Her hand catches under his ribs. Her fingers are sharp lines of pressure around his wrist. His lungs are empty.

The tableau, again: six foot five inches of Bog King suspended delicately in the impossibly strong arms of Marianne, five foot five inches even. It is an artist’s rendering of a dip as unexpected as an earthquake.

Neither of them breathe for a second too long, until biological necessity forces them to suck oxygen in simultaneous desperation. Her hand around the cage of his ribs takes up every iota of sensation his body is capable of processing. Her lips are parted, purple, the color smeared out from its confining lines with sweat.

“Have we,” he says.

“Do I,” she says.

Carefully, she levers him upright. She adjusts his collar. With one pink finger, she gently rubs a smear of blood from his worsened lip. Her own palms are bloodied from the bite of her nails.

“I’m sorry,” Bog says, dimly, “what did you say you were here for?”

“My sister,” Marianne says, equally stunned. “Dawn. I was told she was last seen here.”

The dance hall. The glittering shining sister. Marianne, like a sword. Bog remembers all at once.

He pulls back. “Maybe,” he says, deliberately avoiding the wide round eyes of their audience, “this is a conversation better held in my office.”


End file.
